New Year, New Ideas, New Possibilities Linky Party

I'm excited to join the New Year, New Ideas, New Possibilities Linky Party hosted to Primary Possibilities! Hopefully everyone will be able to find some new blogs and teaching ideas!

Hi Everyone! This is Karen from Little Second-Grade Somebodies, and I'm really excited to be a guest blogger! I teach second grade math and science in a large urban school district in North Texas. Up until two years ago, I had taught primarily 5th and 6th grade (and I'm talking a good number of years). Then out of the blue our new administrator changed many assignments, and I was moved to second grade. I was NOT happy. But, once I got through that first year, I realized I really like the little people. I still have a lot to learn, but I think that I have been "re-mojofied."

 It's funny how everything comes full circle. Let me explain. When I first started teaching, I remember a professor leading a room full of teachers through an exercise on building schema through various activities like KWL charts, etc... Once schema is built then learners can make connections. Well the reason I'm stating this is that for the longest time after that I never heard another thing about schema and connections. But, now what do we hear about? You guessed it! Schema and connections. But haven't we been doing this all along? Sure we have.

So, I want to share with you a couple of activities from one of my TpT products that I use with my kiddos in conjunction with science instruction.  I love the idea of keeping science journals, but in second grade journals can sometimes be a mess. So I started creating journaling pages the kids can use that: 1. are organized and set up in such a way that little ones won't cram all of their writing into one square inch of paper; and 2. are designed to facilitate making connections and reflecting on learning. Initially this is a whole class activity, but after two or three times, and with some gradual release, the kids can complete them by themselves. When you read them, you will be amazed what they can tell you! Enjoy these freebies!

Thanks for having me as a guest blogger!

Happy Teaching!

Karen

Little Second Grade Somebodies

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Be sure to check out my guest post at Second Grade is Out of This World!